UrArtU and the Architecture of Ephemerality

UrArtU Gallery, on its opening night in Alserkal Avenue, saw the delicate symmetry of a flower magnified and translated into gleaming metallic structures that hovered serenely over its marbled floor, courtesy of Stonetta.

The space felt suspended somewhere between fragility and permanence, an intentional contradiction that set the tone for the evening.

By Saher Azmi

Gurgen Yeritsyan, better known as Gosha, is the gallery’s founder. With over fifteen years of experience, his practice has consistently pushed floristry beyond decoration, repositioning flowers as vessels for art, design, and emotional expression. Through exhibitions, installations, and spatial projects shaped by global cultural collaborations, Gosha treats florals not as accessories, but as a language in their own right.

Crosby Studios, founded by New York–Paris based designer and artist Harry Nuriev, is the latest of these collaborations. Working across art, architecture, fashion, and spatial design, Nuriev is guided by his principle of Transformism, a philosophy that collapses boundaries between concept, space, and storytelling. His environments are not meant to be observed from a distance, but entered, inhabited, and felt.

At the far end of the room, beyond a lavish, almost Hadean feast of cheeses, pomegranates, grapes, and fruit, framed behind a walk-in flower fridge backlit in a deep, bloody red, rows of bouquets appeared. Composed of familiar stems roses, carnations, chrysanthemums they had shed their ornamental role entirely. Here, flowers became architectural units, defined by mass, repetition, and rhythm rather than fragility.

Orchids dominated the night. Their presence echoed throughout the space, from a six-metre-tall anchoring structure suspended overhead to the smallest details, including intricately sculpted doorknobs. Repeated and scaled, the orchid became both motif and message, at once sensual and structural.

The collaboration between Nuriev and Gosha unfolded as a living, breathing presence, one that pulled you in and quietly encouraged you to linger. Flowers shifted from objects to experiences, from beauty to tension. Light caught and ricocheted off aluminium-composite walls, amplifying reflections and creating a sense of unease beneath the elegance. Perhaps that tension is intentional, a reminder of the ephemerality at the heart of floristry itself. A fleeting beauty, held briefly in space.